Jan

5

Seven Pillars of Wisdom

Filed Under B2B, Blog, data protection, eBook, Education, eLearning, healthcare, Industry Analysis, internet, mobile content, Pearson, privacy, Publishing, Search, semantic web, social media, Thomson, Uncategorized | Leave a Comment

My holiday reading, courtesy of Skip Pritchard who gave it to me, has been Michael Korda’s vast biography of T E Lawrence, and despite my familiarity with the story, I have found it an entrancing experience. Lawrence is almost impossible to reconstruct, since he shone a different light in the direction of every individual he met, and one is left feeling that nowhere does a real Lawrence exist. So very like the information game, then! Every observer sees a different fraction of play, and no one can predict the outcome. This comment is meant to mask my residual guilt at reading my book while my knee mended and not writing pages of forecasts and predictions for the amusement of readers, and to confirm my frailties as a prophet of anything.

Lawrence wrote “The Seven Pillars of Wisdom”, one of the world’s unread classics (and almost unreadable in parts: he lost the only copy of the full manuscript on Reading train station and had to recreate 200,000 words, during which he clearly became bored.) In 800 words I can communicate seven thoughts – not so much Pillars  as pillows, and not predictions but observations of this unknowable industry. Here goes:

1.  Some think its about content and others that it is about platforms and technology. For me it is still about communications, and the greatest challenge is still holding people’s attention, having gained their recognition. Even Facebook hits a plateau. The gods remain Reputation, Identity, and Attention.

2. You are either a communication company or you are not. News Corp is a format company. It does newspapers, film and television and has little corporate bandwidth for non-format communications. This cannot be changed by executive whim, and the collapse of Beyond Oblivion, its music initiative, before the holidays (http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2012/jan/04/music-service-beyond-oblivion-folds), as well as the veil of silence around the performance of The Daily on the iPad, following on as they do the oblivion that was My Space, demonstrates all of this very well. Yet Mr Murdoch has signed on to Twitter. There is no evidence yet that the world can be saved with a single Tweet. There is no evidence yet that traditional media and information businesses can recreate themselves in new marketplaces without either starting afresh somewhere else  or by buying a new business and moving into it. Boinc.

3. Apple, according to MacRumors (http://www.macrumors.com/2012/01/03/apples-january-media-event-to-involve-digital-textbooks-and-education/), is about to enter the textbook market, maybe with Pearson and certainly via the iPad. This was apparently a dearly held dream of Steve Jobs, at least according to Walter Isaacson, who is shaping up to be not just the biographer but also the Delphic oracle. I have some doubts – not about the iPad as a display device, but about whether markets want textbooks re-invented. Learners would like learning re-invented, and made easier and more compelling. Textbooks are an extinct format. And learning should operate equally well on whatever platform you have available. What a waste of all this energy around eLearning if we abolish the old formats like textbooks and replace them with rigid device platforms. And yet I am sure that the analysts are right – there are only a few global growth markets and education is the largest.

4. Then I had a great comment from Brad Patterson at EduLang (www.edulang.com). He points out that 500 million people are trying to learn English and only 50 million can afford textbooks, online or otherwise. So his business model for his interesting TOEFL and TOIEC Simulators is “pay what you can”, with half going to a reading charity. In many ways this is very neat – it reaches out to 450 million people with a trust relationship, and could be a really interesting business model to watch. Above all, how encouraging it is to see someone moving the goalposts – we did not score many goals in regular business model configurations so lets applaud the courage of someone doing something different.

5. Semantic Web technology and deployment in mass markets is getting closer and closer. I took part in the beta of Garlik (www.garlik.com) some 3 years ago, partly because of an interest in technology around identity, and partly out of interest in technologies derived from the University of Southampton Computer Science department, and blessed by such eminences as Wendy Hall, Nigel Shadbolt – and Sir Tim Berners Lee himself. Two days before Christmas Garlik was sold to Experian, in a move that I think was as significant as Reuters buying ClearForest all those years ago. Garlik protects personal identity through web search, was founded by the men who built the UK online banks Egg and First Direct, and backed by Doughty Hanson. This is a straw in a wind which will go galeforce.

6. But if the Semantic Web is going to be so clever, and linked data will recreate so many service environments, where is it now? Well, look at the obvious places. In most of our economies building and construction is the largest sector in terms of activity and players, large and small, and has great companies serving it with supplier and materials information. Thus, in a US market replete with Reed Construction, Hanley Wood and McGraw-Hill. But what if a semantic web-based environment were able to search all online catalogues and directories to produce a sweeping coverage of suppliers and products that was at once more detailed and more comprehensive than any directory-style database, and could include more metadata from suppliers and users to create a continually developing industry specification site, deliverable and self-formatting to every platform and device? That is what interests me about MaterialSource, (http://www.materialsource.com/about) as well as its use of SPARQL, Semantic Web Pages for faceted and graph-based browsing, smartphone and tablet Apps using HTML5, ontologies etc, etc. If they do it, someone will have to buy them!

7. I keep on thinking about the neglect of audio, so I was delighted to see SoundCloud (http://soundcloud.com/). There has to be room for an audio portal, and a community for sharing sound and cross-referencing its sources and users. I anticipate that they know things about users that Beyond Oblivion didn’t.

Last words of a predictive nature before I get back to real work. A correspondent asks “what technology are you following in 2012!” Since I say every week that I am not following technologies but users, I take mild offense at this, but I do admit to a penchant for 3D printing. Now that really could have an impact. Especially in medical workflow. I have also been asked by a venture capitalist who should know better what is likely “to be certain” to succeed this year. He is a serious man so I owe him a serious answer: anything that saves more time and money than it costs. The prime example this year in the UK has been Shutl, a delivery logistics service that gets your online purchases to you physically (average delivery time in London was 90 minutes, with a cost of £5). Is that all the queries? I am beginning to feel like an Agony Aunt!

 

Dec

29

The Ape and the iPad

Filed Under B2B, Big Data, Blog, Financial services, healthcare, Industry Analysis, internet, Publishing, Reed Elsevier, Search, Uncategorized, Workflow | 3 Comments

The news (BBC, 29 December) that Orang Utans in Milwaukee are using iPads to watch David Attenbrough while covertly observing each others behaviour reminds me at once of how “early cycle” our experience of tablet tech still is, while how little we still extract from the experience we have of all digital technologies. So, by way of apologizing for missing last week (minor knee procedure, but the medical authorities advised that no reader of mine could possibly deserve my last thoughts before going under the anaesthetic…) and wishing you all (both…?) a belated happy Christmas I am going to sort through the December in-tray.

The key trends of 2011 will always be, for me, the landmark strides made towards really incorporating content into the workflow of professionals, and the progress made in associating previously unthinkable data collections (not linked by metadata, structure and /or location) in ways that allowed us draw out fresh analytical conclusions not otherwise available to us. These are the beginnings of very long processes, but already I think that they have redefined “digital publishing” or whatever it is that we name the post-format (book, chapter, article, database, file) world we have been living in now for a few years and are at last beginning to recognize. Elsevier recognized it all right with their LIPID MAPS lipid structures App (http://bit.ly/LipidsApp) earlier this month and I should have been quicker to see this. This App on SciVerse does all of the workflow around lipid metabolisms  and is thus integral to the research into lipids-based diseases (stroke, cancer, diabetes, Alzheimer’s, arthritis, to name a few). The LIPIDS MAP consortium is a multi-institutional, research-based organization which has marshalled into its mapping all of the metadata and nomenclature available – common and systematic names, formula, exact mass, InChiKey, classification hierarchies and links to relevant public databases. Elsevier adds the entity searching that allows the full text and abstracts to support the mapping and in data analysis terms to draw the sting from a huge amount of researcher process effort. Whenever I hear the old Newtonian saw about “standing on the shoulders of giants” I replace shoulders with “platforms”.

So how do Elsevier pull off a trick like this? By being ready and spending years  in the preparatory stages. Elsevier, in my view, has become two companies, and alongside a traditional, conservative journal publisher has evolved a high tech science data handling company, conceived in Science Direct and reaching, via Scirus and Scopus a sort of  adolescence in SciVerse. This effort now moves beyond pure data into the worktool App, driven by SciVerse Applications (www.applications.sciverse.com) and the network of collaborating third party developers which is increasingly driving these developments (http://developers.sciverse.com). This is and will be a vital component. Not even Elsevier can do all these things alone. The future is collaborative, and here is the market leader showing it understands that, and knows that science goes forward by many players, large and small, acting together. And if developers can find, under the Elsevier technology umbrella, a way of exposing their talents and earning from them (as authors were wont to do with publishers) then another business model extension has been made. There is much evidence here of the future of science “publishing” – and while it may be doubted that many (two?) companies can accomplish these mutations successfully, Elsevier are making their bid to be one of them.

And there is always a nagging Google story somewhere left un-analysed, usually because one could either write a book on the implications or ignore them , on the grounds that they may never happen. But Google is the birthplace of so much that has happened in Big Data that I am loath to neglect BigQuery. With an ordinary sized and shaped company this would all be different. I could say for example that LexisNexis is taking its Big Data solution, HPCC (www.hpccsystems.com) Open Source because it wants to get its product implemented in many vertical market solutions without having to go head to head with IBM, Oracle or SAP. But Google clearly relishes the thought of taking on the major analytics players on the enterprize solutions platforms, and clearly has that in mind with this SQL based service, which has been around for about a year and now enters beta with a waitlist of major corporate users anxious to test it. And yet, wait a minute, Google, Facebook and Twitter led us into the No SQL world because the data types, particularly mapping, and the size of databases involved, pushed us into the Big Data age and past the successful solutions created in the previous decade in SQL enquiry. So is what Google is doing here driven mostly by its analysis of the data and capabilities of major corporates (Google doing market research and not giving the market what Google thinks is good for them!) or is this something else, a low level service environment that may take off and splutter into life, or may beta and burn like so many predecessors. Hard to tell but worth asking the question of the Google Man Near You. Meanwhile, the closest thing to a Big Data play in publishing markets remains MarkLogic 5.0. Coming back to where I started on Big Data, one of the most significant announcements in a crowded December had Lexis Nexis – law this time, not Risk Solutions – using MarkLogic 5 as the way to bring its huge legal holdings together, search them in conjunction with third party content and mine previously unrecognized connectivities. Except that I should not have said “mine”. Apparently “mining” and “scraping” are now out of favour: now we “extract” as we analyse and abstract!

However, I wish every scraper and miner seeking  a way forward every good wish for 2012. And me? Well, I am going to check out those Orang Utans. They may have rewritten Shakespeare by now.

 

 

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